Without having to contact the vendors directly, I was wondering if anyone can give me the approximate cost of the CMDB solutions offered by the vendors listed below (i.e. Less than $100,000.00 or more than $100,000.00 - if you can be more specific, even better!)

It depends on many variables, such as the total number of users, their roles, the total number and types of systems, the provisioning models, etc.

In our own case we start with a flat fee that represents a basic point of entry but the costs can go up or down depending on the needs of the client.

Also, be VERY careful about assessing the price of anything. If you pay "$X" for nothing but a CMDB, is it really worth the dollar value of you're paying "3*$X" for something that has a CMDB and 30 other solutions that replace and/or avoid other systems in your enterprise? For example, if you have to pay for a CMDB, a Change Management system, an Incident Management System, and for each of the integration solutions between them, wouldn't it be more cost effective and easier on the enterprise to pay for something that had all of them pre-integrated and provisioned all, together? Many of the ones you listed are "independent" solutions, not integrated solutions.

Also, one of the reasons why the pricing is not available upfront is because there are many parameters that you need to take into account when you evaluate such purchase, like:

Number of users, sometimes concurrent ones
Your network capabilities may dictate in part the architecture (does it need to be available on another site where your bandwidth or latency is limited)
How you want to host the solution. Do you own the hardware? What DB technology does it run on?
Your DRP
The deployment costs will vary based on your scope
The cost of linking to all appropriate system monitoring tools or sources of configuration updates
Training costs
Cost of your test environment
Ongoing cost of internal resources to administer, update, further develop the tool's capabilities
etc... there is a number of other elements

The trick for is to look for the TCO. Determine all those parameters in advance and use them in discussing with the vendors. They all try not to get boxed in but in the end, that's how you determine which solution is the one you can justify the investment for._________________BR,
Fabien Papleux

itilarnie wrote: To use the one from BMC, you need ARSystem (about US$20000) as well as the Asset management application (about US$35000), then you still need to buy user licenses.

This scares me and should scare most enterprises that are trying to implement ITIL. This means that to implement a very small part of ITIL, you are automatically into the $100K+ range and the end result is that you've only enabled a very small percentage of your enterprise to have access to these solutions.

This is exactly why we "black-box" our solution for our clients. Virtually everything that is needed by the consumer (SW, HW, Storage, Forward Development, Deployment, Maintenance, Support, etc.) is included in the per user price and the consumer knows exactly what they're getting, down to the dollar.

It also means that for one locked price, the ITIL solutions in the black box keep growing with no added cost to the consuming enterprise. (In other words, the connection to us is like your connection to your utility companies.) What scares me is that we're so much cheaper and offer so much more. Makes me wonder if we should raise our prices???

Fabien, your point about understanding the TCO is extremely important and accurate. An important point to understand is that many IT resources don't want to admit to their actual TCO. (Reference many of the posts where people try to justify the build and ownership of their own tools, like CMDBs.) There are still too many IT resources that want to "own" their own implementations and don't want to admit that it can be done cheaper, better, and faster by someone else who actually specializes in such solutions. (There are probably many different reasons behind such justifications.)

If you think about it, any enterprise that has dedicated resources that are implementing ITIL, in a company whose vertical business is "not" to provide ITIL solutions, is incurring expenses that take away from their vertical business revenue. The reality is that most enterprises that have IT resources trying to implement ITIL don't have the necessary experience or the deep wallets to really make it happen. This is why so many enteprises only implement 1-3 ITIL disciplines per year (this is very optimistic based on the data we're seeing) and why their implementations are "always" incomplete.

I think it will take time to get IT resources in vertical non-ITIL enterprises to admit that they shouldn't be trying to implement, manage, and own their own ITIL platforms. Only when these IT resources outsource these solutions will they truly get the greatest ITIL bang for their dollars, while enabling their enterprises with the most advanced IT solutions (In other words, the lowest TCO for greatest features/functionality and quality). Human nature seems to be to avoid change that is not understood. It takes a few big picture thinkers to make such changes and their value be understood.

Your Enterprise:
- What's the number of intended users?
- Where you're located (Country/Region/etc.)?
- What is the number of facilities that will be involved in using it?
- What kind of vertical business is your company in?

Your Needs:
- What are the specific Problems you're trying to solve?
- What are your expectations for features of the tool, data volumes?
- Will you perform human data entry, script/agent data entry, both?
- What are your implementation timeframes?
- How do you expect to use the tool?

Your Budget:
- How much are you willing to spend to buy?
- How much are you willing to spend to provision for?
- How much are you willing to spend on training?
- Are you willing to put dedicated resources around maintaining everything and if so how much are you willing to spend on doing so?
- How much are you willing to spend to customize after purchase?
- How much are you will to spend year-over-year to perform upgrades, maintenance and everything else that's needed to keep the tool in your environment?
- Etc.

If I have answers to these questions I might be able to help you better.

Please feel free to contact me directly at my email address (Frank<.>Guerino<@>TraverseIT<.>com) and I'll do what I can.

While ToolSelector.com is an adequate place to start, please note that it is highly incomplete. Most ITIL/ITSM tool providers don't even know about ToolSelector.com, yet.

You will get far more useful information by simply searching Google using keyword phrase matching. Use the syntax shown below with each of the keyword phrases and you'll get a very good set of responses:

That was really a tremendous amount of information for me. Thanks a lot for your advice. My apologies, I was out of office for a day and hence could not reply.
I will get the detailed information with respect to the queries raised and get back to you.

This is my first configuration management implementation and hence I want to be well prepared for the whole thing.

Frank, you can contact me on vinod dot n <@> ae dot ey dot com

Warm Regards
Vinod_________________"The hardest work of all is to do nothing”